Editor's Corner

Gary Soto, A Simple Plan, poems: A new collection that returns to the themes of place, childhood, and kinship with the down-and-out in Fresno. (Chronicle)

Mark Strand, New Selected Poems, poems: more than twenty-five years after the appearance of his first Selected Poems, Strand offers a magnificent new gathering of work, one that spans and celebrates his remarkable career to date. (Knopf)

Donald Hall, White Apples and the Taste of Stone, poems: This sumptuous volume collects 226 poems across sixty years of Hall’s celebrated career, including twenty new poems; a CD of recordings is included. (Houghton Mifflin)

Carl Phillips, Riding Westward, poems: In this startling and distinctive eighth collection, Phillips meditates on that space where the forces of will and imagination collide with sexual and moral conduct. (FSG)

Robert Pinsky, First Things to Hand, poems: This chapbook serves as a kind of literate anthropology, but is also vintage Pinsky: casually erudite, charged with steady passion, a pleasure to read. (Sarabande)

Martín Espada, The Republic of Poetry, poems: The republic in Espada’s eighth collection is a glorious place of odes and elegies, memory and history, miracles and justice. (Norton)

Richard Ford, The Lay of the Land, a novel: In this triumphant follow-up to Independence Day, Frank Bascombe returns, acutely in thrall, as always, to life’s endless complexities. (Knopf)

Mary Gordon, The Stories of Mary Gordon, stories: These forty-one pieces, half of which are new or have never been collected, masterfully capture the nuances of modern life. (Pantheon)

Marilyn Hacker, Essays on Departure, poems: This book gathers twenty-five years of elegant, delectable work from eight books, as well as translations and new poems. (Carcanet)